Pick a topic and do a survey or poll to find out what others think. Collect your data on paper or on the web. Share it with writing, charts or graphs.

Choose a topic

Pick a topic that is interesting to you or others.

Decide whom to ask

Usually, for a survey to be useful, you need to tell your readers a little about who completed the survey. You don't have to name them, but you should be able to describe who they are - ages, gender (boy or girl), grades, etc.

Create your form

1. Decide what questions you want to ask and what information you want to collect.
2. Your questions can be short answer, multiple choice (choose one or more), rating scales and more.
3. Your survey can include the participant's names or it can be anonymous (no names). Sometimes on anonymous surveys, people feel more comfortable being honest about personal topics. Sometimes, if it's anonymous, they might also not provide serious answers.
4. You should include some questions to describe who is answering your survey, for example,
   1. Are you a _boy or _girl?
   2. What grade are you in?
5. Now choose how people will complete your survey. You can make a table and ask people in person, and fill out the table with 'tally marks.' You can design and print paper ballots for people to fill out and return to you. Or, you can make an online form, using Google Documents.

Conduct your survey

Often, you'll need to get permission to do a survey.

Tally the results

Count the responses for each question. If you collect responses on the web, the computer will do this for you.

Create a graph or chart

Draw a graph, or make one using a spreadsheet (At school, we have Google Docs or iWork Numbers).

Write about it

Tell your readers what you learned.

More ideas

Think of other ways to share your findings.

Download instructions

This is a 20 page handout to help guide a group of students through a complete survey project. It includes some of our sample work and published results.

Survey examples

These are surveys that have appeared in previous editions: